This Week At City Hall: Another Apartment Block Up For The Chop

Big item this week is a recommendation from Planning Commission to city council to remove the Crescent Apartments from the Heritage Holding Bylaw. If council says yes to this at their meeting tonight (5:30 pm at city hall if you want to show up), that will clear the way for the Crescent Apartments to be torn down and a three-storey multi-purpose commercial building erected on its ashes.

The Crescent Apartments contain 12 rental units. You can see a screencap of the building that I pulled from Google Street View to the left.

So, yet more affordable housing getting torn down in the midst of a housing crisis. And as we’ve reported before, the owner of the building, Westland Ventures, is also the owner of 1755 Hamilton St which is also up for demolition.

I’ve only read the L-P coverage of the RPC meeting that this was considered at, but apparently, the owners are saying that the building is so rundown it’s unsafe to live in and too expensive to fix up. RPC found the argument compelling enough to agree that the building should be relieved of the limited heritage protection the Heritage Holding Bylaw affords, but they also said, gosh, in future, we really gotta do a better job of protecting our heritage properties and our rental housing stock. Or something like that.

Exactly how many of these housing issues is this council going to be coming late to, anyway? If I had a dollar for every story I’ve felt deserved the title, “Horses Gone, Council Closes Barn Door”, why, I’d have many more dollars.

One thing that shouldn’t be forgotten in this is that council’s Regina General Hospital Area Secondary Plan identifies the 14th Ave corridor out to Broad Street as an area they’d like to see redeveloped as a commercial strip where medical offices and various health-care-related uses could locate.

So it isn’t just that the building is too old to save so the housing units have to go. Council is encouraging landowners along that strip to consider housing in that area an undesirable use. How many other apartments in that area are being let slide into disrepair because the owners are just waiting to tear ’em down and put up x-ray clinics and doctors’ offices because that’s what council wants them to do?

It’s also worth considering that if council had gotten their new condominium conversion policy finished a few months sooner, this would have been a perfect candidate for conversion. It’s a gorgeous heritage-status-worthy building and under the new policy, heritage properties can be converted to condos no matter what the vacancy rate is. And, as was demonstrated repeatedly during the slew of conversions over the last couple years, selling off units as condos is an easy way for property owners to fund building maintenance they’ve been slacking on for decades.

(If only there were council-sanctioned ways that I could profit off being a slacker. I could be a millionaire!)

Personally, I’d rather see these 12 units of housing stay in the market, even as condominiums, rather than lose them entirely to a commercial development. Especially seeing as Broad Street seems to be ably taking up the role of medical corridor that council once imagined for 14th Ave.

But, hey, council doesn’t want any housing on 14th, not even condos, so it’s unlikely the landowner would’ve conceived of using the condo conversion bylaw anyway.

Be interesting to see if any of this gets addressed at council tonight. You should come out and see what happens.

Also on this week’s city hall schedule….

Monday, March 12CITY COUNCIL (5:30 pm): Beyond the Crescent Apartment’s status, council will also be holding second and third reading on alterations to the city’s Taxi Bylaw. It will consider extending the tax exemption on the Cornwall Parkade for one more year, the Local Improvement Program for 2012 and a proposal to put a restaurant in 1916 Dewdney.

Also up for consideration is a proposed apartment building for 2112 Osler Street. It’ll contain 12 units of rental. Which offsets the loss of 12 units in the Crescent Apartments, I suppose. But that also means that there is no net increase in housing with this construction so you can hardly call it a step forward.

Wednesday, March 14REGINA PLANNING COMMISSION (4:00 pm): RPC will be looking at proposals for a group of townhouses on 4175 Green Apple Drive and a low-rise apartment building at 1932 Cameron Street. So I guess there is some potential forward movement on the housing front this week. To the tune of 104 condominium townhouses and eight apartments.

Also on RPC’s agenda is an action plan update on the Core Sustainability Action Plan. I don’t have time to really go over what’s happening here. But seeing as how city staff tried to shuffle this neighbourhood plan under the rug not too long ago, this’ll need some scrutiny.

And that’s it for this week at city hall. For full reports and agendas you can check out the city’s website.

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Author: Paul Dechene

Paul Dechene is 5'10'' tall and he was born in a place. He's not there now. He's sitting in front of his computer writing his bio for this blog. He has a song stuck in his head. It's "Girl From Ipanema", thanks for asking.
You can follow Paul on Twitter at @pauldechene and get live updates during city council meetings and other city events at @PDcityhall.
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9 thoughts on “This Week At City Hall: Another Apartment Block Up For The Chop”

“the owners are saying that the building is so rundown it’s unsafe to live in and too expensive to fix up.”
$140,00 to do minor repairs is TOO MUCH to save a Heritage Building??!! with 12 units? (or worse, $140,00 to fix up low income housing with what, 34 units?)

and, uh…. How much will it cost to BUILD a new building??? with 12 units?

are we crazy??! or just bad at math?

This building is beautiful, inside and out. More importantly, it was HOME to many people, who were happy to live there. It has a long history in the city – many have lived here, close to downtown, close to work, since 1920.

Heritage, walk to work, WOW – this building has it, inside and out, is discussed, but decisions always move in another direction, towards destruction. Sad + sad….

The only possible way this city will have any heritage property is if they move it in from some dying small town. If owners don’t give a shit, and the city only pays lip service to preservation nothing will change. Do you ever wonder why any TV ad or movie shot in a skating rink is always shot in a really fucking old skating rink? (It’s because they’re beautiful). Why do so many people travel to New York and Europe? Architecture is always a stated reason. The older the better. Of course in order to have a nice old building you have to let it get old, maintain it a little, and not tear it down so you can buy yourself a new kitchen, or build a fucking medical corridor. We will never have heritage buildings here. There is no will.

A 3 storey medical building will benefit a lot more people than the 12 unit apartment building that exists. I’d like to know if some of you that berate the landlords have $150,000 to renovate a 100 year old building. Probably not. It’s alot easier to point fingers and be a martyr.

Disappointing. That building has a lot of character. I visited friends living there and thought “I’d like to live here someday” because of the beautiful living room with the huge windows and the fireplace. I lived there for four months while between living arrangements, because I needed a place in Regina to stay and my friend needed someone to stay with her. It was pretty great. I’m sad to see another affordable place to live bite the dust.

This has happened to both apartments I’ve lived in for 3-4 months… I must be cursed. Guess I should stay away from the only places people can afford to live in.

This was my first apartment back in 2005 when rent was still $450/month…. really sad to see it go as I had many fond memories in that building. It’s unfortunate that developers care much more about the bottom line than restoring such a beautiful building with so much history and character. This building should have been maintained through it’s lifespan. I see lots of 100+ year old buildings in Toronto that have been maintained and continue to have a lot of useable life left in them.

Where are the people currently renting in this building going to go? A rhetorical question, of course.